Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters
What is PURSUE, the U.S. UAP declassification programme?.
A plain-language explainer of the programme behind the files in this archive: what it releases, who runs it, and what the documents actually contain.
What does PURSUE stand for, and what is it?
PURSUE is the effort under which the U.S. Department of War publishes previously classified material about unidentified anomalous phenomena on its public site, war.gov/ufo. Rather than releasing everything at once, it publishes in batches: 4 batches between May and July 2026 have made 334 records public so far.
What is actually in the files?
Four kinds of material: 189 documents (memoranda, field reports, investigation files, correspondence), 103 videos — mostly sensor footage from military aircraft and ships — 27 still images, and 15 audio recordings. They come from several agencies: the Department of War, the FBI, NASA, the CIA, the Department of State and the Department of Energy, among others.
What years do the records cover?
From 1945 to 2026. The oldest material is post-war paperwork from the 1940s and 1950s — the era of Project Sign, Project Grudge and Project Blue Book — while the most recent includes modern sensor video of the kind the Navy has acknowledged since 2017.
Do these files prove anything about extraterrestrial visitors?
No. The records are what the government wrote at the time: sighting reports, radar and sensor logs, internal correspondence, and in the more recent cases the assessments of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Many describe events that were later attributed to aircraft, balloons, satellites or sensor artefacts; others were closed without a conclusion. The value of the archive is documentary, not evidentiary.
Why are so many pages blacked out or unreadable?
Two different reasons, and it matters which. Redaction is deliberate: names, sources and methods are blacked out before release. Illegibility is accidental: much of the older material survives only as carbon copies or microfilm scans, and no amount of processing recovers text that is no longer on the page. This archive tells you how many pages of each document were actually readable.
Is the material free to reuse?
The records themselves are works of the U.S. Government and are in the public domain, so they can be reused freely; crediting the originating agency is good practice. The indexing, transcriptions and translations on this site are provided free for anyone to consult, and we ask only that citations link to the original file as well.
Browse the files
Every record described here has its own page, with the original document, a transcription you can search, and the official description.
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